Arms Warrior DPS Guide — Dragonflight 10.2

Arms Warriors are strong but somewhat slow damage dealers which revolve around building burst damage windows with Colossus Smash. Their greatest strength comes in the form of a versatile toolkit, offering Single Target, close-range cleave, burst AoE, and even a limited form of physical damage immunity.

Like most classes, the new talent system in Dragonflight has led to a large number of changes and new options allowing players to allow players to customize their gameplay. While Arms' primary rotation is very similar to that of Shadowlands, it has increased emphasis on Execute, and there are now many more multitarget options than before. Overall, Arms gameplay is significantly sped up compared to similar points in Shadowlands, and while the gameplay is not quite as fast as Fury, it is often near-GCD locked and very engaging.

Strengths

• Very flexible toolkit, able to spec into several damage profiles, ranging from single target, to two-target cleave, sustained multitarget, or Execute phases.
• High mobility class due to Charge, Intervene, and Heroic Leap.
• Multiple defensive abilities between Die by the Sword, Defensive Stance, Spell Reflection, and Rallying Cry.
• Source of the important attack power buff Battle Shout.

Weaknesses

• Downtime significantly penalizes damage potential.
• Talent buids are heavily specialized, sacrificing one capability for another.

From Patch 9.1.5 onward, both Legion Timewalking and the Mage Tower have returned. As such we have created a separate guide detailing what you can expect from the Mage Tower challenge available to Arms Warriors.

There are several changes for Arms Warriors in Patch 10.2, improving the functionality of Skullsplitter and increasing overall damage significantly in exchange for no longer allowing Ignore Pain to be used offensively. Rallying Cry has also been nerfed alongside changes to most other group-wide defensive cooldowns, leaving it still in a relatively strong place.

1. All ability damage increased by 6%.
2. Slam damage increased by 25%.
3. Improved Slam Critical Strike damage increase reduced to 10% (was 30%).
4. Mortal Strike and Overpower damage increased by 10%.
5. Skullsplitter and Tide of Blood now causes Deep Wounds and Rend to bleed out 100% faster for 10 seconds (was expire instantly).
6. Rage spent on Ignore Pain no longer contributes to Anger Management, Tactician, and Test of Might.
7. Rallying Cry now increases current and maximum health by 10% (was 15%).
8. Inspiring Presence has been removed.

If you want to play an Arms Warrior but currently do not have one at max level, you can check out our leveling guide for tips on your journey.

Once you reach the max level, it can be somewhat overwhelming to completely change the way you play by suddenly implementing a large number of addons in a short space of time, especially if they have a heavy visual impact on your UI. We recommend using some of the more basic addons recommended on our Addons page below while leveling so that you have more time to get used to them during the easier phases of playing your class.

Arms Warrior is a relatively simple spec based on resource management. As there are few on-demand Rage generators; most resource generation comes from auto-attacks, so anticipating them along with the cooldown of important abilities is important to ensure that you neither find yourself Rage starved and unable to use Mortal Strike on cooldown or capping and wasting Rage generation during Bladestorm.

The rotation has a fair amount of downtime, which means a fair bit of time will be spent simply waiting. While you could fill empty Global Cooldowns with Slam or Whirlwind, doing so constantly can leave you unable to use Mortal Strike when you need to. It is very important to ensure you keep Mortal Strike on cooldown and maximize spending Rage during Colossus Smash rather than outside of it.

If you are an absolute beginner to the spec but would like a refresher on the basic fundamentals of the Warrior class, we recommend looking through the Spell Summary first, as well as the Easy Mode page below.

If you are already somewhat familiar with Warriors, you can head straight to the Talents and Rotation pages to jump right into the more complex, detailed information.

Gearing is often a matter of choosing the highest item level piece available, but there are important nuances to consider, especially when it comes to statistical breakpoints and special effects gear. You can find information on how best to gear an Arms Warrior on our dedicated gearing page, which includes the current Best in Slot items from this tier.

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.

Starting off as an Arms Warrior can look very different from the absolute end-game raiding and progression as one. Our Mythic+, Torghast, Raiding, and PvP guides can guide you to perform as well as possible, regardless of your focus on end-game content.

If you are finding your performance lackluster but are not sure where you are going wrong, you can check out the pages below for potential tips or answers to questions you may have.

Arms has an extremely versatile toolkit, capable of building for single-target damage windows, two-target cleave, sustained damage against multiple targets, and Execute phases. However, its biggest weakness is that it is not particularly effective at doing several of these things at the same time, encouraging you to specialize rather than trying to be a jack of all trades. Defensively, the traditional lack of self-healing is now compensated for through Class talents and Arms also feature several defensive abilities on short cooldowns, making them very strong against constant rot damage, but the lack of immunity or cheat death mechanics leaves them vulnerable to high spikes of damage.